Christmas in Quartet:“John Sings Deep!

A sermon based upon John 1: 1-14

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

Sunday, Dec. 20th, 2020 Christmas

 in Quartet: 4 Part-Harmony of the Christmas Story

 

 

Back in 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth.  It was the first time a human being could ever look down and see our planet as a whole.  You could actually see Earth brightly illuminated against the blackness of space. 

 After that, perhaps the most famous photograph from space of earth,  after the pictures taken from the Moon, was the picture known as the ‘blue marble’ picture taken by NASA in 2002.  It’s what has been named, ‘God’s eye view’ of the Earth.  It reveals the beautiful earth our tiny, fragile, but spectacularly beautiful home.  The reproduction of this image today, makes the earth look like a Christmas ornament hanging against a deep, black sky of dark.  

 Can you imagine that, the earth like hanging in darkness, like a Christmas ornament?

 We’ve been considering the Christmas story in 4 part-harmony; looking into how Christmas is presented in all 4 gospels; Mark, Matthew, Luke, and today, we consider John. 

 Each of the 4 gospels have their own way of telling us about Jesus.  Mark heads straight for the cross, telling us nothing about Christmas; but telling us how Jesus dies as God’s Son on the cross.  This is what mattered most to him.  

 Matthew tells us some about the Jewish circumstances surrounding his birth, as the ‘Christ who shall save his people from their sins.’  He gives us other details from Joseph’s point of view.  He also tells us how Herod, the Jewish ruler, tried to kill Jesus and the family had to flee to Egypt.  

 Last week, we learned how Luke’s most familiar story about Jesus being born in a manager is most beloved and well-known.   But this story is a highly charged story of God’s love for the poor, who trust God as their last and only hope in this world.  Jesus was born and placed in a humble manager, so he could challenge and change the world on behalf of those who were poor, outcasts, and sinners.

 Today, we come to the final gospel picture.  We compared Mark to a lead singer, Matthew to a dissonant singer, Luke to the loudest singer, but today, we hear from John who could be called the ‘deepest’ singer; perhaps like singing bass.  

 It reminds me, when the Band director pulled me out of Chorus class in High School, and asked me to play bass drum in Marching Band, and then later, Tuba in the Concert Band.  He told me, when you play the bass part, nobody hears you, or listens to you, unless you mess up.  And if you mess up, then everybody in the band messes up too.  You are the one who keeps the whole band playing in rhythm together.

 That’s a good way to describe John’s music of Christmas too.  It’s deep, it’s poetic, and it’s powerful theology, but nobody really thinks about it that much.  It’s beyond most people, but it still holds the rest of the gospel pictures of Jesus together. 

 

LOVE SUPPORTS EVERYTHING

Let’s go back to that image we started with; of the earth hanging in darkness like a beautiful blueish/white Christmas ornament.   Who hung it there?  

 Answering this is great question is where John begins Christmas.   He not at the cross.  He doesn’t take us back to Abraham like Matthew does, nor did he take us back to Adam, like Luke does.   No,  John takes us out there with that the picture of that tiny, brilliant-blueish marble hanging in the dark sky.   John takes us to the ‘beginning’ of everything.

 No, of course, John wasn’t a Scientist.   In his day, the people who studied the stars were more Astrologers than Astronomers.   Astrologers didn’t look at the stars for what they were in and of themselves.  No, Astrologers looked at the stars and tried to figure out what they could tell us about life, about us, and about what might happen in the future.

 Today, we know that Astrology isn’t a Science.  It’s more like a pastime; perhaps even a pastime for people looking for ‘love in all the wrong places’.  

 But when John looked into the night sky, he was looking at love in the right place.   He didn’t look at what kind of story the stars could tell all by themselves, but he looked at the truth, the grace, and the love that was behind the stars.   There, when everything in heaven or on earth, had its beginning, when the earth was hung in space, love was there, and pure love put life there.

Now, of course you can’t prove all this.   You can’t prove that the love created the world, and love is the purpose of life, anymore than you can prove that God created the world or that God is love.   As I said in message on this text back in June,  there are somethings in life that can’t be proven, and they are just as important as the things that can be proven.   In fact these unprovable, spiritual truths about life, may be even more important than all the stuff we can prove by scientific methods.

 This is where John is taking us, as he opens his grand picture of God’s love.  This great love that ‘so loved the world’ is there as the great ‘Word’ who creates the world.   Although John can’t give us any details about ‘how’ the world was created,  he does what he can do; he explains how God’s love is the great mind, the great Spirit, and the great Word, who is behind the world.

 This is where the ‘good news’ of Jesus really starts, John is tell us.   It starts ‘at the beginning’.  John takes us back the that moment just before the ‘Big Bang’ , and tell us that God was there, and so was the ‘Word’ that was God.

 Now, here, we need to be careful.  John is not saying that the Bible is the Word that is God, but John is saying that Word of God, that becomes ‘flesh’ as Jesus Christ, is the same as very mind, voice, and truth of God---all the way back to the very beginning.   John is saying that back when everything started, God was there, God’s truth was there, God’s love was there, and so was the story God’s redemption for this world he created.

 Understanding Jesus as the one and the same as the Word who created life, or spoke life into being as God does in Genesis, means that now, God can redeem life by speaking his Word through Jesus Christ now.   

 Here, in this text, we find some of the simple, profound, but richest images expressed in human speech, WORD, LIFE, LIGHT, DARKNESS, GRACE, AND TRUTH.   These ordinary words are being stuffed with extraordinary meaning.  And just like God spoke the world into being with a simple act of speaking, God now speaks, his words in a kind of ‘Christmas’ language, that should not be hard for us to understand.

 It is amazing, how quickly a child can understand Christmas isn’t it?  I recall how quickly our own daughter caught on to the wonder of Christmas, not because she understood everything about the present we gave her, but how she loved unwrapping the presents and playing with the wrappings themselves.   In that first year she was with us, she loved the wrapping paper, first and perhaps most.  But by the next year, the paper came off pretty quick, and was never every played with again.

In the same way, the true message of Christmas is deep, much deeper than the wrapping paper of the lights, the music, the gifts and the festivities.   But as we grow older, and as we grow wiser and smarter too, we’ll soon be able to grasp the ‘real’ present in the gift we are given.  

 That’s where John’s going with his message about Christmas.  It’s deep, really deep, but he’s uses simple images we should understand; Life, Light, Darkness, Truth and Grace. 

These images are very simple to say, and to envision, but they have truth in them, that may take us years of unwrapping and unpacking to fully understand. 

 But that’s why we have Christmas every year, isn’t it?  So that we can keep experiencing it, hearing about it, and learning about it, until we finally have enough spiritual wisdom to understand it right.

 

THE LIGHT WILL NEVER GO OUT

And what does it mean to get these images right?   

 Well, let’s consider the bright shining one here: LIGHT.   When John speaks of the ‘light’ and contrasts it with darkness, he has a double meaning.   The ‘darkness’ will not able to apprehend the light; because the darkness can’t comprehend it either.   Darkness cannot destroy what it doesn’t fully understand.  The darkness has no real power over the light, because darkness isn’t really a power, it’s the absence of a power or a light.

 What what does this have to do with Christmas.   Well, it’s LIGHT we’re talking about.  Light always has to do with Christmas, doesn’t it?  What would Christmas be without LIGHTS.  And while some people might trace the Christmas LIGHTS with the pagan uses of LIGHT in the Long nights of Winter, the original LIGHT of Christmas, had a whole different meaning, altogether.

 Again, this meaning goes all the way back to Genesis, right after God said, started all “Let, There Be Light”. 

 According to John, the God who turned on the lights to create the physical world, is being challenged by the moral, spiritual darkness of this world.   And just like God had to overcome the physical darkness the first time; this time the moral darkness of this world is challenging God’s light, both spiritually and physically.   That’s not hard to grasp is it, that we can see parallels between moral light, and physical light; moral darkness and spiritual darkness, and how often seem to be a war with each other in the world.   

But it’s really no contest, John wants us to know.  The darkness can’t really extinguish or put out the light.  The light, God’s spiritual light is too powerful for that.  The only what that the ‘spiritual light’ can be put out, is when we reject the light, ignore the light, or refuse to turn the light on in us.

 And that’s exactly where John is coming from.   In the Old Testament story, after God creates Light, and the World, and calls everything good, God also creates human being ‘in his image’.  Human beings have the ‘light’, or the ‘image of God’ stamped in their hearts, originally, from the beginning.  

 But something happens in that creation story, if you remember.   Human’s allow the Snake, the Serpent, the Devil himself, to pull them away from following the ‘light’ that God puts in them.  Because humans give into the lesser, darker ways of living, ignoring their own relationship with God and his light in them, they give into disobedience and sin weakens the light of truth, the light grace, and the light of love in them.

 And this is so true about our world, sometimes isn’t it?  While there is no real substance to darkness, but darkness is the absence of light, when it gets dark, it can seem really dark, can’t it?  The story about Adam and Eve, putting out the light by disobeying God’s love and light, is a dark story of deception, doubt, and wayward desire; but it’s not just a story about what went wrong in them; it’s really the story about what still goes wrong in us.  

 We have great light of potential and truth in us, but we can ignore it, deny it, cover it up, and try to put it out, in our own lives too.  We humans keep messing with the ‘light’ we have been given, by hate, divisions, going to war, tolerating poverty and oppression; and by failing to protect this beautiful fragile earth too.  

 Each of us carries the emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical scars too, of the things done to us and the things we’ve done to each other.   We carry anger, shame, hurt, and defeat around too long. 

 Worst of all we carry resignation.  We give up.  We say nothing can be done about it.  We give into a darkness, that shouldn’t be able to win, because it has no real power in the light; but instead of overcoming the darkness with light, we sit down in the darkness and run away from the light that can change how we see everything.

 And it is this kind of darkness, this moral, spiritual, and emotional darkness, that God’s light has come into the world, to shine God’s light upon.   

 John wants us to know that the same God who spoke light in the middle of the great darkness of nothingness, has the power to speak his Word again,  and shine bright enough to dispel the darkness of our moral, spiritual world too.  And this light is a light that will shine in a way that it can never be put out.

 

LIFE IS EVEN MORE THAN JUST BEING ALIVE

What is the light that can’t be put out?   How does the same love that created the world, make a way to redeem the world that has lost it’s way, in the dark?

 Well, if LIGHT, is one of the most visible images or metaphors in John, LIFE is the other.  And the LIFE that John puts on display is the WORD of life that God’s speaks again into this world, just like God once breathed and spoke LIFE into humans in the beginning.

 The LIFE that God speaks again, now comes into human life again, in Jesus Christ, the one born of human flesh.   But this LIFE isn’t only meant to give birth to Jesus alone.  This life is to give ‘new birth’ to anyone who believes on him.   As John says, in him was the ‘light that enlightens everyone’, and just like the says ‘in him was life’ he says this power for life, can be anyone who will receives him.

 The big bang in the first story, was the creation of the world; but the big bang in the redemption story is how ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’.   This is the next big step beyond Genesis.  God, has spoken again, and comes to us as Word, as Light, and as Life.  

 And this is the part of the Christmas story, John doesn’t want us to miss.  It’s bigger than anything else that can be said at Christmas.   It’s bigger than the Christmas lights.  It’s bigger than the Christmas packages.  It’s even bigger than going to Grandma’s house; and it doesn’t get much bigger than that.  But this is what makes the lights, the packages, and the trips to Grandma’s and everything else mean something, that really means something because LIFE means something that the devil can never steal or take back.   And do you know what that is?

 Do you know what the devil can’t take away from us?  God.   God is not far off in some distant heaven, nor so far back in history of religion that he doesn’t matter.  God is not a distant clock-maker, who wound up the world and left the universe to run on it’s own.   No, God has come among us to know us from the inside out.   When it says here, that God has ‘lived among us’, it literally means, God has ‘pitched his tent’ among us.  We might say, though Jesus Christ, “God has moved into the neighborhood’.    God wants us to know, once and for all, that God is not only ‘out there’, beyond anything we know, but God is also ‘right here’ in everything we know.  There is not looking at us ‘from a distance’, but God sees us close up.  And while God’s gets a good look at us, we can get a good look at him too.   According to John, that’s what Christmas means; God has become flesh to be among us.

 But there’s something else going on here.  John’s deep music about the incarnation; God becoming flesh and dwelling among us,  means something else, we must not miss.

For not only does God become flesh, because God has entered human flesh, we can become ‘children of God’ too.   This is the other side of the meaning of the incarnation.  God has come into flesh through Jesus Christ; so that now, the Spirit of Jesus can get into us, in our own human life of flesh and blood.

 Linda Bridges, who currently teaches at Wake Forest, Divinity School, tells about growing up in a pastor’s home in S.C.  She says when she was 12 her Dad announced that a 97 year old man, Mr. Dixon, was too be Baptized on a Sunday Evening.   It scared her.  What if her Dad dropped him?  What if he died while under water?  

 When the time came for him to be baptized, he began to speak and share about how 80 years ago, when he was 16, he heard a fire and brimestone preacher, called Cyclone Max, preach a sermon entitled, "Who is Jesus, Anyway".  But, Mr. Dixon said, he put it out of his head.  He didn't want to get into that church stuff.   But the question never went away.  Finally, now, at age 97, with the end of life in front of him, he knew he finally had to do something about it.  He needed to finally answer, 'who' Jesus was for him, anyway.

I'm glad Mr. Dixon finally answered the question.   The sad thing is that he just about waited too long.   Not everyone gets that long to answer.   What we need to know now, is that the Christmas story from John is deep, but this isn't about  information, it’s also about transformation.   As I quoted Athanasius, who also quoted Irenaeus, two great early Christians who barely didn’t make into the Bible, both said: ‘This God became what we are in order to make us what God is.   Here’s the ultimate gift, and good news of Christmas.  The incarnation isn’t about information, it’s about transformation.   This image of God that was given to us, and has been tarnished or darkened by sin, can now be remade and Re-stamped in us.   For just as God’s glory entered flesh in Jesus Christ, through Jesus, God’s glory and goodness can enter and become light and life in us.  

 And do you know what is most wonderful about this new ‘life’ from God.   In rest of John’s gospel,  Jesus will teach us over and over, through all the people who encounter him; Nicodemus, the Woman at the Well, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, the other, all the others too, will remind us that in Jesus we can be ‘born again, from above, and we can be find ‘living water’, and living bread so that we never thirst or hunger again.  

 And do you know how all this happens?  Because Jesus isn’t just a baby who is born in a stable, or to Mary and Joseph, nor is Jesus a simple man who lived a good life on earth, but Jesus is the Bread of Life, the Water of Life, the Great Shepherd, and the Way, the Truth, and the Life, so that we, who believe, and follow his light, can come to the Father, through him.   Through Jesus, the life that has been broken, and the world that went dark, can be healed and enlightened.  

 For you see, just as Genesis is the first Creation story, John puts forth his gospel as the Redemption story.   This is the chance God is giving the world, to get things right and to have hope.  

 And in this struggle to get it right, we aren’t alone.  God has entered the darkness with us, and he dispels it too, because he is light and he is life---then, and now.  

 

Amen.